Yahoo says Brazil will win World Cup

Yahoo scientists use Tumblr data to predict outcome

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch)—The World Cup has yet to start, but Marissa Mayer’s team already knows who will win: Brazil.

Yahoo
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says it used data from its Tumblr site to size up the strengths of the teams in the competition and figure out who will likely prevail.

The analysis by a team of Yahoo scientists is based on the premise that there’s valuable data in all the World Cup chatter on Tumblr.

“Soccer (or, if you prefer, football) fans are loud,” the Yahoo team said. “But fans aren’t only loud in stadiums. They also make their voices heard across social media. And though you may assume these fans are just blowing their vuvuzelas into the social abyss, if you listen closely, you’ll discover a treasure trove of data—including possibly an answer to the most important question of all: Who will win?”

The Yahoo team said they sifted through 188.9 million Tumblr blogs with 83.1 billion posts for their analysis. For their final World Cup findings, the team zeroed in on 27.3 million “relevant blog posts” from February to May .

“In order to figure out how each country will stack up against each other, we needed to assign values of strength to each team,” the team said. “These values were calculated according to each matchup and provided a representative game score.”

For each matchup, Yahoo came up with an estimate for the number of goals each team would score using a concept in probability theory called Poisson distribution different parameters, such as “team mentions in #WorldCup-related posts” and “team mentions in #soccer-related posts.”

For example, the Yahoo predicts Germany beating Portugal and Spain outplaying Holland. Using this system, Yahoo came up with a bracket and a final winner, Brazil.

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